There are times (not infrequent) when I like to ponder deep time and deep space. Doing so is enhanced by an image of a galaxy. This Astronomy Photo of the Day features a distant (200,000 light years away) galaxy that is oriented perpendicular to our plane of view.
"From the core outward, the galaxy's colors change from the yellowish light of old stars in the center to young blue star clusters and reddish star forming regions along the grand, sweeping spiral arms. NGC 1232's apparent, small, barred-spiral companion galaxy is cataloged as NGC 1232A. Distance estimates place it much farther though, around 300 million light-years away..."
Earth's position in our Milky Way would be near the tip of one of the spiral arms.
I first encountered "normcore" in an episode of the final season of Orphan Black, which would have originally aired in 2016. The scene as I remember it featured a young woman on the cutting edge of modern fashion and style speaking to a vanilla-bland bespectacled lab worker, describing him as "totally normcore." When he acknowledged that, her paradoxical response was "that's so cool!" 😀
So I had to look up the word, because I'm pretty normcore myself. Here are excerpts from Wikipedia:
Normcore is a unisex fashion trend characterized by unpretentious, average-looking clothing. Normcore fashion includes jeans, T-shirts, sweats, button-downs, and sneakers...
In 2013, the word was employed by trend forecasting group K-HOLE in a report titled "Youth Mode: A Report on Freedom". As used by K-HOLE, the word referred to an attitude, not a code of dress. It was intended to mean "finding liberation in being nothing special".
In 2014, an article in New York magazine by author Fiona Duncan conflated normcore with what K-HOLE referred to as "ActingBasic", a concept which involved dressing neutrally to avoid standing out. It was this misunderstanding of normcore that gained popular usage. That same year, "normcore" was named runner-up for neologism of the year by the Oxford University Press.
In 2016, the word was added to the AP Stylebook.
A variation on this concept for women has been called "menocore" from menopause. It is loose and comfortable clothing, usually in light or neutral colors, that fits a variety of informal social situations. The style suggests that the wearer is mature, self-confident, and not seeking attention from men. Designer brands associated with this style of dress include Eileen Fisher, J. Jill, and Donna Karan.
Columnist Sara Tatyana Bernstein has said that the style suggests that the wearer has leisure time and wealth, giving it class connotations, and that it can be stereotyped as the style of a woman who is middle-aged or older and already wealthy enough that she does not need the kind of job that would require more formal clothing.
More at the link and elsewhere, but enough for now.
In a heartbreaking video posted to social media, an FHP trooper gets out of his patrol car and walks over to the black and white dog standing in a flooded area with water up to his chest...
Wednesday's sad scene, which took place off the interstate just north of Tampa Bay, comes as Milton, now a Category 4 hurricane was expected to make a direct hit near Sarasota in the early hours of Thursday morning."
"The Bann Cross, which was placed in 1818 at the base of the Aletsch Glacier by Jesuit priests hoping to stop its advance. The glacier can now be seen at the left, in the far distance."
Image and text from a rather nice photoessay about shrinking Swiss glaciers in The New York Times.
"A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.
Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession. The correct spelling, therefore, would be “Rosis Bar”, “Katis Kiosk”, or, as in the title of a recent viral hit, Barbaras Rhabarberbar.
However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name...
The Deppenapostroph is not to be confused with the English greengrocer’s apostrophe, when an apostrophe before an ‘s’ is mistakenly used to form the plural of a noun (“a kilo of potato’s”)...
Even before the rule clarification, the German orthographic council permitted the use of the possessive apostrophe for the sake of clarity, such as “Andrea’s Bar” to make clear that the owner is called Andrea and not Andreas."
This is the Tuesday, October 8 analysis from Tropical Tidbits. Next update will be tomorrow pre-impact.
For those unfamiliar with the topography of Florida, here are some screencaps I took from the 3D view on Google maps, first showing the general impact area of the previous hurricane (Helena) in the "Big Bend" area of northern Florida -
A shoreline dominated by saltwater marshes and natural areas, with few developments on the water excerpt for small recreational ventures. By contrast, here is what Hurrican Milton will encounter when it strikes land in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area -
Anna Maria is a barrier island at the entrance to the harbor, covered by homes and condominiums. One of my high school classmates rode out Helene there in a home 13 feet above sea level. He and his wife will evacuate before the arrival of Milton. On the north side of the harbor are more barrier islands -
- plus housing developments that were presumably created by dredging and filling. I would assume that a 10-15' storm surge will bring water into the second floor of those homes, while on the surface the hurricane winds will create battering waves laden with debris. The destruction of property will be catastrophic.
For those tempted to enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing rich people get what they deserve, remember that many of those afflicted will be middle-class elderly people whose life savings have been put into a retirement home or condo unit. You can modify a Zillow search of these areas to get a sense of the situation.
Today I saw something I've never seen in my life and frankly didn't know could happen - lilacs blooming in October here in Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin's Longenecker Horticultural Gardens here in Madison have an immense collection of lilacs (400 specimens), which draw large crowds of locals each spring. When I read that they were re-blooming, I headed over this afternoon. It was stunning to see and smell fragrant blossoms on plants that were already dropping foliage for the autumn season:
Extremely rainy weather in early spring when the common lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) were beginning to flower brought an acute outbreak of blight caused by the bacterium pseudomonas syringae... the bacteria caused the lilacs to defoliate in July and go dormant, as if they were getting ready to survive winter. Then in late summer, with about 18 days of cooler temperatures, they responded as if it was spring... The arboretum has a weather station, so Stevens said he knows that starting Aug. 6 there was a temperature shift, and Madison went from the high 80s to highs in the mid-70s with 50s at night.
“We got pretty cool combined with the rain,” he said. “And what happened is the plants responded as if it was spring. So they came out of that dormancy and started throwing flowers.”
Stevens said the flowers will be blooming until there is a killing freeze or even a hard frost, which generally happens in the first two weeks of October. Then the plants will get ready for winter and go dormant.
When I started TYWKIWDBI seventeen years ago, the unofficial motto was "you learn something every day." That was literally true today. (actually it's literally true every day, but more so today).
As I walked around this afternoon my eye was caught by a tree that looked ever so much like a Prince Rupert's drop:
I found the tag, which indicated that this is a type of sugar maple. I presume this is its natural configuation, because our arboretum prunes boxwoods and some other shrubbery, but not maples. Besides, if they trimmed the top, it might explode...
I'll go back for a foliage photo near the end of this month.
An absolutely delightful movie, IMHO. The embedded trailer has an unfortunate imbalance in the audio stereo channels, rendering the background music too loud, but will give a decent overview of the sense of the movie. The movie has undertones of a "You've Got Mail" rom-com but without the stereotypical Hollywood Happy Ending. Anne Bancroft won the BAFTA for this role in 1987, but the movie received mixed reviews in the U.S. Many readers of TYWKIWDBI will be familiar with this movie, and are invited to leave reviews in the Comments.
Because of the subject matter, the movie came highly recommended in this book -
- which is very much a book for bibliophiles. It begins with the obligatory chapter about Ben Franklin, then discusses The Old Corner (in Boston), mobile bookstores, Marshall Field, NYC stores, Nazi and alternative lifestyle stores, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Parnassus (Ann Patchett). If you have ever wondered "what happened to Brentanos/Waldenbooks/Borders/B. Dalton," you can find the answer here.
"The little tracts of wilderness grow on Maple Edge Farm in southwest Iowa, where the Bakehouse family cultivates 700 acres of corn, soybeans and alfalfa. Set against uniform rows of cropland, the scraps of land look like tiny Edens, colorful and frowzy. Purple bergamot and yellow coneflowers sway alongside big bluestem and other grasses, alive with birdsong and bees.
The Bakehouses planted the strips of wild land after floodwaters reduced many fields to moonscapes three years ago, prompting the family to embark on a once-unthinkable path.
They took nearly 11 acres of their fields out of crop production, fragments of farmland that ran alongside fields and in gullies. Instead of crops, they sowed native flowering plants and grasses, all species that once filled the prairie.
The restored swaths of land are called prairie strips, and they are part of a growing movement to reduce the environmental harms of farming and help draw down greenhouse gas emissions, while giving fauna a much-needed boost and helping to restore the land...
Researchers counted 586 acres of prairie strips on farmland across seven states in 2019. As of last year, they had spread to 14 states, filling 22,972 acres.
While the acreage accounts for a tiny fraction of the Midwest’s farm fields — Iowa alone has roughly 30 million acres of cropland — researchers said the strips had disproportionately positive impacts...
Soil erosion and surface runoff plummeted, as the prairie plants held soil in place and transpired water. Levels of nitrogen and phosphorus carried in surface runoff from adjacent cropland decreased by as much as 70 percent, absorbed instead by the prairie strips, resulting in less water contamination. The prairie strips created better conditions for helpful bacteria, resulting in dramatically lower levels of nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas generated by chemical fertilizer, compared to cropland without prairie strips. The strips also drew twice as many native grassland birds and three times as many beneficial insects, compared to fields that had not been rewilded...
In late 2018, the prairie strips initiative got perhaps its biggest boost when it was included in the federal Conservation Reserve Program. That meant that farmland owners who converted some of their acreage to prairie strips could collect money from the federal government. According to the Agriculture Department, the average payout for prairie strips is $209 per acre each year...
Still, federal payments for prairie strips can end up being less than revenue from livestock or crops. An analysis from Iowa State University found that even with government help, prairie strips generally cost farmers around $64 an acre a year, because of factors such as cost of conversion and taxes..."
Embedded image cropped for size from the original at The New York Times.
Instagram influencers are promoting "perineum sunning" as a health practice.
“In a mere 30 seconds of sunlight on your butthole, you will receive
more energy from this electric node than you would in an entire day
being outside with your clothes on,” says an influencer, who goes by Ra
of Earth. In a viral video
that has racked up more than 35,000 views, he gestures toward the sun
as three naked men lie down, point their backsides to the sky and make
sounds of pleasure.
“[Thirty] seconds of direct sunlight injection to the anal orifice is equivalent to being outside in the sun all day!”
My father was a traveling salesman in the era before AC was common in cars. I don't remember any facial asymmetry, but his left elbow was always more darkly pigmented than the rest of his body. Via.
Reposted from 2021 to accompany my new post on "sunscreen absolutism."
An article in The Atlantic considers the possibility that Americans' fear of skin cancer has resulted in too much avoidance of sun exposure.
Then, in 2023, a consortium of Australian public-health groups did something surprising: It issued new advice that takes careful account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions. The advice itself may not seem revolutionary—experts now say that people at the lowest risk of skin cancer should spend ample time outdoors—but the idea at its core marked a radical departure from decades of public-health messaging. “Completely avoiding sun exposure is not optimal for health,” read the groups’ position statement, which extensively cites a growing body of research. Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun.
It’s long been known that sun exposure triggers vitamin D production in the skin, and that low levels of vitamin D are associated with increased rates of stroke, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression, osteoporosis, and many other diseases. It was natural to assume that vitamin D was responsible for these outcomes...
But sunlight in a pill has turned out to be a spectacular failure. In a large clinical trial that began in 2011, some 26,000 older adults were randomly assigned to receive either daily vitamin D pills or placebos, and were then followed for an average of five years. The study’s main findings were published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2018, and additional results were released in the same publication two years ago. An accompanying editorial, with the headline “A Decisive Verdict on Vitamin D Supplementation,” noted that no benefits whatsoever had been found for any of the health conditions that the study tracked. “Vitamin D supplementation did not prevent cancer or cardiovascular disease, prevent falls, improve cognitive function, reduce atrial fibrillation, change body composition, reduce migraine frequency, improve stroke outcomes, decrease age-related macular degeneration, or reduce knee pain,” the journal said. “People should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend life.”..
Health authorities in some countries have begun to follow Australia’s lead, or at least to explore doing so. In the United Kingdom, for example, the National Health Service is reviewing the evidence on sun exposure, with a report due this summer. Dermatology conferences in Europe have begun to schedule sessions on the benefits of sun exposure after not engaging with the topic for years...
It turns out that UV light essentially induces the immune system to stop attacking the skin, reducing inflammation. This is unfortunate when it comes to skin cancer—UV rays not only damage DNA, spurring the formation of cancerous cells; they also retard the immune system’s attack on those cells. But in the case of psoriasis, the tamping-down of a hyperactive response is exactly what’s needed. Moreover, to the initial surprise of researchers, this effect isn’t limited to the site of exposure. From the skin, the immune system’s regulatory cells migrate throughout the body, soothing inflammation elsewhere as well...
That said, we now know that many individuals at low risk of skin cancer could benefit from more sun exposure—and that doctors are not yet prepared to prescribe it. A survey Neale conducted in 2020 showed that the majority of patients in Australia with vitamin D deficiencies were prescribed supplements by their doctors, despite the lack of efficacy, while only a minority were prescribed sun exposure.
Much more at the link. Please read the source material rather than relying on my selected excerpts.
